julianeon

So how would I use these Chinese models by API? I assume I'll pay by API call.

Since I think people are getting this confused:

He's saying that a full body MRI is so valuable, that if you got one and then smoked for a year, you'd be in the same place as you were before you started, health wise. No loss.

Obviously you'll come out way ahead if you don't do the smoking part: it's very valuable, in other words.

You know what's going to happen is some budding CEO will come along and read this and conclude, "I know the solution: my company won't give to charity." It will become enshrined as this principle in their company lore, that nothing can detract from The Work. Managers will parrot it, HR may even add it to onboarding. But it will be an empty gesture, because as the company grows it will become more and more multifacted, or 'distracted' if you will.

I'm not sure the process can even be stopped, if the company is successful and the new changes appear to be, and probably are, profitable.

To a physio therapist (the article example) that is a business meeting. That's what's strange here. That person isn't there because their you're friend: they're getting paid to be there, which makes it a business meeting, which makes a secretary, human or AI, appropriate.

I've noticed that many famous billionaires want to be viewed as philosophers: Thiel obviously, Musk arguably.

For this they do need ideological coherency and the ability to order their arguments logically, ideally as part of a larger program. Since it is such a popular destination late in life, you'd think it would be a good choice for a major too.

That's the job: experiment until you find product-market fit... or die trying.

This will work for a little while but this can't go on indefinitely: no one is going to want to stick to 30+ year old books.

We should probably work on developing standards for what we want in a book instead of clinging to a losing position.

I'll contest a few of these, which I thought were good.

Breviary: this was, to me, known and not uncommon. It's widely known to Catholics, but also, if you have an interest in medieval art or books, you'd likely know it too. It was one of the main types of books before the invention of the printing press. Think of an image from an illuminated manuscript, 50% chance it's from one.

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia: it's not that you're expected to know the whole word, but they're looking for you to recognize components of it and infer the meaning from that. I knew sesquippedalian (sometimes jokingly used in "long word" contexts) so that was easy: but phobia is also easily identifiable, and hippo, from the latin root, I knew was not as obvious as the animal, but probably something like "large" (clue: the Hippodrome). So you could, even knowing only "phobia" and being able to guess "hippo", have a good basis for your choice.

Complacent and gauche: have heard both these uses, I think that's straightforwardly correct. If this was a dictionary that would, at worst, be the 2nd or 3rd definition. No complaints.

Source: I used to place in spelling bees and could've been a contender but I didn't have the discipline to study the dictionary for hours on the weekends, which is the next level.

I don't think Spotify should be used for music discovery. I know it has that feature and I know the app wants you to embrace it, but I would say: don't use it.

Use YouTube for this. You can find experts, fans, all kinds there who will guide you through genres and act as non-algorithmic, human-sense-making curators. Use Spotify only to find the specific tracks and albums you already know the name of, to listen.

He has identified a real problem, and the good news is there is a solution.

There are some fields where there are a real measurable advantages of physical books, essentially as an archive.

I can name two:

1) Chemical Engineering 2) Classics

In both cases the physical book may be the only place to find certain kinds of valuable info.

In the case of Chem E, I was told this by my father, also a Chem E, who said that some of these old books contained values and tests that were found nowhere else. And while a lot of that is available in modern form, not all of it is.

In the case of classics, I'm cribbing from David Butterfield here, who has a great book tour on YouTube where expands on this at length (4+ hours).

In the 18th and 19th century the level of education was higher and there were simply more people around who were working at the highest level in the field. Their speculations were written down in physical books and nowhere else. Many of these were valuable and showed new insights you won't find elsewhere else, especially for professionals in the field.

Here's an example. The copies that we have of, say, Homer, are copies of copies. Pretend for a moment that Homer actually wrote in English. We can imagine a line in the "original" (a copy of a copy), that says:

He of the stout quarrel chest said:

It kinda works - stout men quarrel, I guess. But you know what would work even better? He of the stout barrel chest. You can make a case that this was an instance of bad copying and should be corrected in editions going forward, especially if you can cite additional evidence.

Multiple this by the Greek & Roman corpus and all the possible permutations and you have a good reason to turn to those books that earlier writers thought very deeply about.

If Claude is actually good enough to commit to rsync, of course I'm going to look at that and think "it's good enough for my side project too." And (benefit to companies aside) that is info it is useful to know, if it's true.

Warfare, or more plainly the deaths of many, seems like a pretty decisive tiebreaker: whatever the flip side of the option that involves the death of thousands is, I will choose that. Of course, without this example, most people would say something like the downside isn't that bad; this case study is instructive because it shows that yes, it is.

It's not a perspective we usually see: the nobility, not as a noble or morally elite class, but as a problem that a successful government can manage and minimize, without violence.

That looks good - nice to have an alternative too.

Personally, I think all funding in California education (other than terminal levels like 4 year bachelors and up) should be a function of the percentage of students that succeed at the next step.

This has the unintended consequence of encouraging schools to eject students who are struggling. For example, if the student has a learning disability, declare that it's too serious for them to handle, and then transfer them to a school that theoretically can.

The system gets gamified and the "top" schools are just ones that reject, socioeconomically, every student who can't pay for tutoring or full-time care, which is a very technical form of "excellence".

He makes good points: I probably would have skated over this if not for the line-by-line reading. After examining it more closely, I think the "population increased by a lot" line seems especially unnecessary.

Sure, but from the perspective of the individual renter (who arguably doesn't have the power to change rent control law anyway), their point stands.

I think they will eventually get to the point of technological differentiation but they've got to start somewhere: they must first have an electric car on the market before they can start experimenting with it to improve the performance 1.5x, 2x, 10x.

At some point, EVs are going to pull ahead of ICE cars not just incrementally, but categorically. Instead of 0-60 in 3 seconds, it'll be 0-60 in under a second: the limits are physics and the human body, not the engine. Full self-driving, native to the architecture. Over-the-air updates that do things like improve the car's range by 5% (Tesla did something like this). And more no one's thought of yet.

So, this is their beachhead. You've got to start somewhere: they're starting here.

Would it though? It seems like it could work, even if people opt to "not comply" aka pay the fine.

Charge $1,000 fee per acre (eyeballing it, that seems reasonable). There are people who will clean an acre to be spotless for $500: not bad for a day of honest, actually contributing to the environment, outdoor work!

If I'm missing something and it actually costs more than I know, raise it to $2,000. If heavy trash needs to be removed also, charge that too, by weight.

And if you don't pay, you're banned.

It's worth a try if you ask me.

Great idea. I starred this on GitHub, where by the way for those are interested, your star will be statistically significant (only about 100 now).

https://github.com/templatical/sdk

He means "careful that the 9k of revenue doesn't come from ads that the scamming owner placed so that the site could show higher traffic => ad revenue." In other words, paying $2 for ads to send people to your website, to make $1 on the ads that the ad platform now shows to your "audience."

In the US and Germany, economists say that war and defense companies have to pay a "social stigma premium" since average people don't really like to work there given equal wages. The premium is a revealed preference: even people who wouldn't articulate a moral objection are implicitly expressing one through their labor market behavior.

So if you look at how they behave, it seems that many people agree.

True, but if the guy contacting you is the actual owner of the website you use to buy domains, his credibility increases enormously. He said this person was a customer on his platform. When that guy says "I have a website which is making 10k/year," and I already trust the domain platform he created because I use it as a customer, I believe him.

I see it more as 20-40 on Flippa. Where are you seeing 12x monthly revenue sales?

This was common in America once. Around the 1900's, in "wild" places like Texas, you'll see references to clouds of butterflies, in memoirs and such.

You are absolutely right and that jumped out at me. I should also point out the obvious: if people were selling online assets making $9k/year for $9k, there would be a line out the door of people lining up to buy them. If anyone here is selling an asset that makes $X a year for $X, I'll buy it! I make my money back in 12 months and everything else is profit.

So let's value it as it would be valued on, say, Flippa, a decent proxy for "the market." We would look at the monthly revenue: in this case, around $750/mo (which is 9k divided by 12). Then we'd do a multiple of the monthly revenue: 20 is low, 40 is normal. I would actually say 30 here, because this guy created the asset and I would bet he did it well and it's not junk. So let's say it's worth $22.5k.

So I think it would be more accurate to say, "I purchased the site in a deal through assets valued at about $42k, total."

[edit: updated the comment as I got confused about the thing being exchanged - it's a site the guy created that he transferred to make the sale]

Houston has a good collection too.

https://www.hmns.org/exhibits/cullen-hall-of-gems-and-minera...

If fear is the mind-killer, then sexy chatbots are the libido-killer, for me. Hard no.

We would have no book if the author was a hero: they would say "I'm not doing this," quit, and that would be the end of it. By this definition, only an unheroic person could've written it. By the same definition, an firsthand expose of Meta could never be written by a trustworthy person.

This obviously protects the company: you are ceding this ground to them, "No trustworthy person could work at your company and write an expose." I don't think we should cede that to them.

I think self-driving cars are inevitable: I agree with that statement. And once they are here and cheap and safer than humans, they'll become universal. I don't know when that is, but it's less than 100 years from now.

However I don't think Tesla's SFD is inevitable, or any other carmakers; for all I know, they're so bad they shouldn't be sold. It's early days. This or that brand might go out of business. But within 100 years, self-driving will conquer the world.

Something I don't understand:

Why don't you buy used books?

Plenty of supply for a book like the one he mentions, Knut Hamsun's "Growth of the Soil." No question that it was made to the quality level of the time when it was published; early 2000's is probably peak.

I understand some books are so new they won't have any used copies. But for everything else, there's an endless buffet to choose from.